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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

S Voice – this is the Siri-like feature of the device. But the difference is, to activate it, even if your phone is locked, all you have to do is speak to the phone. You can even customize the trigger greeting so it’s literally hands free. You can also use your voice to tell the Galaxy SIII to do other stuff like turn off the alarm, reject or answer a call, or tell the camera to take a photo. It listens to what you’re saying and does what you tell it to do.

Direct Call – this feature lets you directly call the person you want to talk to. When you’re typing a message and you suddenly realize it would be easier to just talk to the person, you don’t have to exit the message to make a call, just place the phone on your ear and it automatically calls the person you’re composing a message to, without pressing any buttons.

Social Tag – this feature automatically tags the people you know to their social network account. So if you look at the photos in your album, it tells you what your friends or family are up to as it gives you feeds from their social account. Yeah, that’s a bit creepy, kind of like the perfect tool for stalkers.

Smart Alert – this feature alerts you if you have missed calls or missed messages as the moment you pick your phone up with some good vibrations.

Smart Stay – this feature utilizes the eye tracking technology. With the use of the front camera, the phone knows whether you are looking at it, so it knows to keep the screen alive. So the phone doesn’t go on standby or lock when you’re reading something or looking at a photo for a long time. But, it also sleeps when you sleep, saving your battery juice.

S Beam – this feature utilizes NFC technology and WiFi Direct which allows for very fast sharing of files. All you have to do is select the file you want to share, like a photo or video, then place another Galaxy SIII on the back of it, so the two devices are back-to-back with each other and voila! The file is transferred.

AllShare Play – using WiFi Direct and DLNA, you can share the content of your device to a tablet, computer, laptop or any other connected device.
Buddy Photo Share – it recognizes the faces on your photos and with one touch, you can share the photo immediately to your friends on the photo as the phone sends it to your friends.

AllShare Cast – this allows you to stream a video or game on to a big screen so everyone can see it. And the great thing about this is that if you use this for gaming, your phone becomes the game controller.

Pop up play – when you’re watching a video and you want to send a message or you received a message, you don’t have to stop the video from playing, you just resize the video and drag it to the part of the screen that won’t interfere with your typing. Then when you’re done texting, just tap on the video to make it larger again.

Best photo – the front and rear cameras feature Zero Lag shutter so when you click on it, it takes a photo immediately. Plus, it takes a burst of eight photos and recommends the best among the eight photos so you will never be caught with your eyes closed.

Release date

At the Samsung event last night, they announced that the Galaxy SIII will be commercially available on May 29 in Europe, then Asia, and will be available in the US by June. The price hasn’t been announced yet but it is expected to cost somewhere between $199-$299 with a two-year contract or about $700 without a contract.

Early reactions

Now that we’ve tackled the specifications and features of the Samsung Galaxy SIII, let’s look at what critics have to say about the device.

Yes, it’s much improved from the Galaxy S II. Yet it’s not amazing enough to meet the market’s expectations; nor did it come with substantial differentiating factors. Our first impression was that it is ‘Great, but not a big surprise.’

GOOD: In our view, 10% of smartphone usage is for voice, while 90% is for viewing; hence, we believe large screens will be a continuing trend in the smartphone industry. (the Galaxy S III has a 4.8 inch screen, compared with the iPhone 4S’ 3.5-inch screen)

BAD: Although the new phone comes with several new features, few of them can be regarded as key differentiating factors, or revolutionary, in our view.

Yes, it seems like the trend in smartphone design is “larger screen = better”. This isn’t really bad, since you don’t have worry about your fingers getting in the way of typing. But as awesome as the features of the S3 are, consumers will never be truly satisfied. Plus, even if the Apple iPhone 5 is still a rumor, everyone’s already comparing it to the Galaxy SIII.

“While the Galaxy S3 will be highly desirable for enthusiastic and advanced users, Samsung will have to build on the already popular Galaxy brand and push it hard to various distribution channels before the iPhone 5 is launched,” said Malik Saadi, an industry analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media.

Though the iPhone 5 is still a rumor, Samsung can’t be complacent–they must push the Galaxy SIII and take advantage of the head start. They should market this phone like crazy in order to sell them before the mythical iPhone 5 gets released.

“Samsung must make the most of a 4-5 month window of opportunity with the Galaxy SIII before Apple changes the game once more with its next generation iPhone,” said Geoff Blaber, analyst at CCS Insight.

About Mellisa Tolentino

Mellisa Tolentino started at SiliconANGLE covering the mobile and social scene. Over the years, her scope expanded to Bitcoin as well as the Internet of Things. SiliconANGLE gave Mellisa her break in writing and it has been an adventure ever since. She’s from the sunny country of Philippines where people always greet you with the warmest smile. If she’s not busy writing, she loves reading, watching TV series and movies, but what she enjoys the most is playing or just chilling on the couch with with her three dogs Ceecee, Ginger, and Rocky.